Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

What really caused the decline of Raves was the printing of the Location on the Flyers, then Massives started Happening. Those two things caused the downFall of real Raves as we knew them to be.

When Narnia happened years ago, the First Massive I remember it was all down hill. WE still went, it was up in the mountains and we luckily Snuck in. It was a great party but it sure didn't feel right, it was just different.

The rave movement is the ancient need of psychonauts to perform the spiritual action of active meditation (dance)

Thru this action, the participants penetrate the realms of extacy. Within the world of extacy lays what we call: direct knowledge.

This type of knowledge doen't need thought to exist.It is based on the archetypes that lay in our subconcious part of the brain.

The psychonauts who actually gain this type of knowledge live closer to the present thus, closer to the future.

It is a time-travel process.

Thought needs time to exist, action does not.

Based on this principle, the direct knowledge gives the time-travelling psychonaut the freedom to walk towards the future and back, giving him the ability to gather information that lays in different positions in time, and giving it to the humans who live in the relative (to those positions) past.

This can accelerate the evolutionary process, in a cubconcious collective manner, so that all humanity can hopefully reach a point ,where a REAL common unity can be born.

--------------------The Source Of The Force
Is The Power Of The Mind

"if you don't like what you're doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove." - timothy leary"Anno: "-I can do anything with those clouds!"Annos Tek

Raves were a fad. Trying to replicate the "free love" of the 60's, bypassing the actual thought needed to attain that condition with X. We have become a generation of speed freaks for some reason. I indirectly blame capitalism. Marijuana would be legal if it increased work production (And I speak in terms of the US) but we are conditioned to move faster, work more, multitask, play the music louder, and get the beat into happy hardcore crap until you start shaking and shivering then it is busted with some OD or seizure. I have never felt any "enlightenment" or anything beautiful at any of the raves I have gone to. It is such a digital environment, with digital drugs, and I am glad it is almost non-existent.

Festivals are the "new" raves. There has been a recent explosion of music festivals which are on the forefront of a gathering of psychonauts, most are reverting back to nature with analog drugs being the most sought.

Quote:electrode said:Have you been to a party for the past few years? You'd probably be appalled.

From what I can gather, I missed the best days of the rave. I didn't start going until 1996, and by my understanding the scene was in decline even back then.

I totally disagree with the rave scene being dead. The premier reason behind the commercialization of raves is because of crack house laws and ?RAVE? acts? The scene is still very much alive but it is now more integrated into the mercantile market not because it chose to be but because it had no place to go after they started crackin down on underground parties. I myself have attended past and present underground events as well as funded a few as well. The risks that lay behind throwin an underground party are very high?not for the attendees but more for the people who are throwing them. If your party gets raided, the only thing people really have to do is Drop their drugs, flee and if they get caught, well no big deal. Its different for the producers of the event. Besides pressing criminal charges, The authorities have the right no confiscate all of your equipment (lighting, sound system, decorations etc?) The same applies for the DJ?s or Live PA artists (turntables, vinyl, keyboards, gear etc?) So people like us just cant run for the hills?we got a lot more to lose then the kids who are coming just to have fun. So, what DJ?s or production companies will take the risk of throwing a rave where 10?s of thousands worth of equipment can become govt property. Raves still do go down?.the Alpha lists do still make there runs even though they jump around all the time. Most of the underground parties nowadays are less then a hundred kids, the Dj?s suck, and there is hardly any lighting and no sound?.but a few months ago I went to one in a abandon 1970?s fassion mall that was off the chain. I went early to help my friends setup and we actually got the plaza fountain running again where we threw in a bunch of pool toys ---the kids loved that shit even though it was packed the whole time!! Main Stage was setup up in the coordidor and had pretty good Dj?s lighting and even a yag laser. DnB room was setup in one of the vacant spaces, a plush chill room with cumfy couches we borrowed (most of the rollin kids were layed out in here makin out---just kssin and cuddling ) in another one and an experimental music tripped out blacklight setup in another lot. There was a keg and N20 tank (which some idiot fuked the nozzle up) setup somewhere else and even though everything was pretty much cleared out, there was still manicans we dressed up all funky. 800+ people?that was the tightest underground party Ive been to in a while but I could tell the people who were throwin in were paranoid the whole godam time because they had a lot of money on the line....an they had to do a shit load of planing and research to pull that one off. There are loopholes you can throw out that will delay cops from busting in but for the most part, they will find a way or a law to get inside (cans of food for cherity events fake deeds, Im sure you?ve seen a lot of them already). Nevertheless, civil rights protect the things most people hide from when they want to attend an underground electronic event rather than a commercialized one. So what if you cant light up a bong in the middle of a dancefloor or you have to tape your drugs to the side of you leg?I like them all.

Happy Hardcore is the precise stereotype of electronic that I hear people state all the time. I dont know what the legalization of Mariguana has to do with this?..Carter not decriminalizing pot had to do with the coke/crack epidemic which sweeped the nation at that time so pot was classified in that same category. The drug of choice at raves is actually not only Exstasy?its just the people rolling tend to stick out of the crowd at a rave more than somebody tripping or even rolling at a music festival. The thinking behind digital music being cold clashy and clangy 12 bit beeps and whistles is also false?..maybe for the keyboards of the early 90?s but this is changing rapidly. I love the idea I can recreate a kurtzweil organ from the 1800?s being played at a circus to a Grand Piano being played in a specific catherdral or a 12 string 1920?s country guitar being played at an outdoor festival. These plugins and patches haven?t been perfected yet but they will within the next decade. I don?t think electronic signifies the most intellectual music created songraft and theory wise, I just think it as the most potential. Recreating any instrument in any place and even crafting sounds that don?t exist or are impossible for an instrument to make is astonishing to me. The warmth of analog sound will slowly start to become re-established as the digital era moves forward.

the only "raves" ive gone to is some rich punks with lots of stereo/lighting equipment taking them out into teh loging roads and lighting up a clearing with killer music. 50-200 people, its realyl quite nice. you get most of teh quality of sound and still pretty good light shows (although batteries with that much draw probably wouldnt last much more that 6 hours) and seemingly everyone doing e or mushrooms.

i dotn do e, dotn do big parties but i went to quite a few back in highschool, they were really fun.

what is teh definition of a rave exactly? does being outside disqualify it?

--------------------The seeds you won't sow are the plants you dont grow.

A rave by definition is a dance that party that usually lasts throughout the night where synthesized music is played. However, since the term, "rave" has sinc the term "rave" has been put hand in hand with drugs and illegal activity through the press and media, electronic clubs and festivals usually dont consider there events raves. The first raves did begin in the warehouse as HIp Hop began in the ghetto and punk began in the garage. Some still think the word rave should only refer to underground illegal techno parties but it has been adapted by most people to represent any dance or electroic music event.

Do you even remember rave? With clubs closing, labels folding and law enforcement agents in hot pursuit, rave culture disappeared under dubious circumstances. We spoke with more than 30 key players in the scene ? DJs, promoters, agents, record shop owners, label managers and publicists ? from all around the country and returned with the candy-colored autopsy.

Words: Bill Werde

"Rave is dead," says Lonnie Fisher. "How long you want to discuss why I feel that way is up to you." Fisher runs the production company Ultraworld. He has been to jail for throwing raves, has personally met with the City of Baltimore to gain the right to continue throwing raves, and, in addition to throwing the best raves on the East Coast throughout the mid-'90s, he threw the first I frequented. These were spectacles of lasers, acid house, breaks, and hundreds, sometimes thousands of kids filling warehouse spaces and industrial parks to meet their rave families, perhaps pop a pill or two and dance their kinetic dances. Fisher has opened a club, Sonar, in Baltimore, and says he has no plans to throw a rave again.

Some told me in '95 when I started going to parties that rave was dead. These were people who had been going for a few months or a few years longer than myself, folks who lamented large flyers and $15, $20, $25 ticket prices. But who were they to piss on my epiphanies? One day I was a frat boy with the full cultural baggage of the breed ? shamefully tolerant of homophobic jokes and misogyny, considered dancing a mating ritual never to exceed an energetic shuffle ? and almost as quickly as the next, I was a raver, hopping weekend busses or joining car caravans to seek out fantastic, relatively secret parties full of like-minded people who were united in their appreciation of the experience and the sound. It was the sound of tomorrow, these squelchy, alien acid-lines and pummeling barrages of bass rising through the smoke and dust. It was the sound of a brighter future, a time and place to come when people would know the physical and spiritual joys of dancing and there would be a mass understanding that being excellent to one another was really where it was at.

Right around the time that my life was being irrevocably altered by the rave scene's potent combination of ideology and chemicals, prominent journalist Simon Reynolds was working on an essay entitled "Rave Culture: Living Dream or Living Death." Eventually published in the '97 anthology The Clubcultures Reader, the piece begins with the acknowledgement that others are saying ?Rave is Dead.' Reynolds convincingly navigates a perceived dichotomy: On one hand, the business of rave was better than ever, thanks to post-rave sub-genres landing on the UK pop charts, and the mass embrace of the weekender/ecstasy lifestyle. "But as for the rave myth, the ideal of love, peace, unity and positivity" he wrote, "that's been smelling funny for quite awhile."

According to Reynolds, "rave culture has never really been about altering reality, merely exempting yourself from it for a little while." But this wasn't true for me, and perhaps it wasn't true for you either. There were ideas at play in the rave scene ? not just drugged kids. Here was the paradigm of the concert flipped on ear: The star wasn't the DJ ? not then, at least ? but the crowd, the lighting, the pills, the physical space of the party itself. You didn't go to a party to stare at a musician. If you wanted passive entertainment, you went to a rock show. If you wanted to immerse yourself in entertainment, to take an active role in your own good time, you went to a rave.

With E, the full-on raver lifestyle means literally falling in love every weekend, then (with the inevitable mid-week crash) having your heart broken. Millions of kids across Europe are still riding this emotional roller-coaster. Always looking ahead to their next tryst with E, dying to gush, addicted to love, in love with . . . nothing.

Nothing? Even as Reynolds was using clinical, academic precision to spell out the nothingness of rave, it was changing my life, much the way I suspect it changed Reynolds' a few years earlier. When I called the author to ask him about the essay, he laughed: "That was written from a point of crisis of confidence, that thing that people go through after a couple of years when they start to have doubts that maybe it's not as exciting as it appears to be, and, even if it is, where is it all leading?" And he admitted what I suspected: "When I got into it in '91, there were loads of people saying it was dead, then."

Are raves somehow less culturally vital then they were a few years ago, or 10 years ago, or than they were in 1986 in England? Does the commodification of a culture ? the music being sold on car commercials, the fashion being sold at every mall in America for awhile (and now not even cool enough for that), even the pills being pimped at frat-houses and yuppie soirees across the U.S. ? does it somehow erode the core experience? Or is passing that judgement just another version of jaded burnouts telling Reynolds he had missed the boat by '91?

I joined the NYC-Raves Internet mailing list and asked for a response from anyone who had gone to their first party in the past six months or so, and had what they would call a "spiritual," "enlightening" or "life-changing" experience. As the day went on, I was surprised by the complete lack of traffic. I received only a couple of mocking replies, and deafening silence. One post, from the list's moderator, was particularly snarky: "I think you're about two years too late."

.

The irony of Reynolds? observation is that today, it seems he got it backwards. The ideals of rave ? Peace, Love, Unity and Respect to some, simple DIY to others ? live on in truly underground events and new rave converts and even in other parties, such as Burning Man. But the business? I spoke to more than 30 key players from the scene ? DJs, promoters, agents, record shop owners, label managers and publicists ? from all around the country, and this much is clear: The business of rave is crashing like a post-binge tweaker.

The rave and club scenes have long held a narcissistic sort of pride in straddling the line between mainstream and underground, happy to sell street cred to any and every willing consumer. But when it comes to organizing as an industry, electronica is in the dark ages. Mainstream music has Soundscan to chart album sales and Pollstar to detail the success of concerts and tours ? services that raves and clubs do not utilize, certainly not with 12-inches and one-offs. According to a source close to the major vinyl outlets in the U.S., sales were down about a quarter in 2001 from their 2000 peak. This year, sales will finish down about a third from that 2000 mark. This is a greater decline than the slowing of the music industry at large, which is down about 20 percent over the same period. Across the pond, Record Industry, by far Europe's largest presser of vinyl, has seen orders drop by 20 percent this year from last.

Two of the biggest and best clubs ? New York's Twilo and DC's Buzz ? have closed and at press time, Spundae in Los Angeles had just suffered a huge raid, leaving its future in some doubt. Attendance at big nightclubs is down across the board in the U.S. and the UK. According to international nightlife research group Mintel, nightclub and discotheque admissions in the UK grew steadily throughout the '90s until '98 when it took its first downturn, dropping steadily each year since. Two of the UK's larger clubs, Cream and Ministry, have closed, and a third, Gatecrasher has gone from a weekly event to a monthly. Ministry's self-titled magazine ? at one point the top-selling title in British clubland ? has folded.

Once blue-chip record labels have closed their doors or been relegated to the margins. In 2001, Ministry of Sound coughed up a substantial sum to sign electro up-and-comers Fischerspooner; now the label has released their Stateside employees (making them all sign confidentiality agreements) and auctioned off Fischerspooner to a major label. Strictly Rhythm ? once one of the most respected labels in the game ? closed its doors this year as well. Steve Lau is president of Kinetic records, the label that released trance "superstar DJ" Sasha's underperforming artist album, Airdrawndagger, earlier this year. Kinetic recently laid off all but a bare-bones staff. "It's a number of factors," says Lau of the dance music industry's decline. "There's the economy, of course. And I think the market was completely over-saturated with DJ mix compilations. Add to that that I think fans of electronic music are more technologically savvy, more likely to download music, than fans of other music. Also, on some level, I think everyone realizes that he or she could be a DJ. Part of the mystery behind the whole thing evaporated."

At the core of all of these industry developments is a feeder system of enthusiastic new customers that is grinding to a halt. Raves are not happening with the same frequency they once did, not by a long shot. "The rave scene is probably a quarter of what it was this time two years ago," says Scott Henry, the promoter of now-closed D.C. club Buzz, and a mainstay in the Baltimore-D.C. scene. "I judge that on calls my agent gets about bookings ? not just me, but DJs across the line." Natalie Perez, a booking agent at PAM (a DJ management company that includes Paul van Dyk and DJ Icey on its roster) concurs: "Between now and this time last year, two years ago, we're having to be more aggressive in our tactics. We lower prices when needed. We've had to approach promoters more than we have in the past.

The danger is that fewer raves becomes its own prophecy. "You used to be able to go to like, Charlotte, North Carolina and there would be two raves on the same night," says Henry. "Now you're lucky if you can find one in the Southeast. Out of sight out of mind? I don?t know. When [raves] are few and far between there is less to rally behind."

.

Sociology says we can think about subcultures cyclically. "Kids take the cultural products that are out there and they tweak them, misuse them," says David Grazian, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in the study of pop culture and its subcultures. "The easiest example to teach is how kids would rip holes in their jeans in the 1980s in order to create a new subcultural style. Then what happens? Jean manufacturers look at what kids are doing and they start mass marketing jeans that already have holes in them. As the cycle moves on, clearly it's companies that are winning. They are constantly able to make more profits by hunting down the cool."

I called Capitol records, the major label that turned Dirty Vegas's "Days Go By" into a hit by placing the song in a Mitsubishi car commercial. They were happy to talk to me because they're busy trying to repeat the formula: At press time, Mitsubishi was launching a new line of cars with 60-second TV spots, featuring the dreamy electronica of the song "Breathe" by another Capitol act, Telepopmusik. Telepopmusik's debut album, Genetic World, saw an immediate spike in sales, up 30 percent the first week, up another 76 percent the next. As Tripp DuBois from Capitol's marketing department explained, Telepopmusik's positioning was the result of the careful cultivation of cool.

"We micro-marketed the record," said DuBois. " With Telepopmusik we did CD samplers and stickers. Our street teams worked the raves. It's that base we built and developed that allows us to get to the next step of exposure from Mitsubishi. When we go these advertising agencies, the band has to mean something. They have to say something. If it's the right thing, the new hip thing, then [these agencies] want to be part of the action as well. It's our job to get to that base so we can transition to the broader marker."

As DuBois spoke, I was daydreaming about how foreign raves seemed to me when I first went. There was no techno on commercials. There was no one handing out marketing materials, as best as I can recall, unless you count flyers for other parties. "We really nailed the game plan," said DuBois. "Mitsubishi kicked in and now we're transitioning. We're going to Modern Rock on November 19 and Top 40 on January 21. We're shooting a video and will ship another 50,000 units."

The big picture is that it seems rave ? regardless of (or in addition to) a sagging economy and a crackdown by authorities ? was in the process of down-cycling, subculturally, on its own. As techno DJ Richie Hawtin says, recalling his early days in the scene, "There was a sense of belonging to a group of people who had found common interests and united to do something a little different, rather than a group of people who had been marketed to." Or as U.S. rave originator Frankie Bones succinctly puts it, "I don't think 14-or 15-year-olds today think rave is the cool thing to do anymore."

One look at the regional rave e-mail lists ? once the lifeblood of information for a burgeoning grassroots scene ? bears out this point. Traffic in all the major regions grew steadily through the end of 2000, then began a freefall. Sometime around early 2001, MW-raves, Mountain-raves, NYC-raves and SF-Raves all took a dive. In many instances, traffic steadily fell to pre-'96 numbers; in July, MW-raves had its lowest volume since October of 1993. In other words, people were rapidly losing interest in raves at the same time that the Feds were making their first big bust with "Disco" Donnie Estopinal in New Orleans. As much as the Feds might like to congratulate themselves, they didn't kill the scene. We managed that on our own.

Folks are quick to point fingers now. Nowhere is the animosity more present than in the relationship between promoters and superstar DJs. "The agents and the big-name DJs refused to give the promoters of the one-off events any breathing room on their fees," says Fisher, "to the point where the big promoters couldn?t make money. Over the last three years I subsidized Paul van Dyk to play in D.C. while I sweat my ass off and lost money. I subsidized Boy George while I worked my ass off and lost money. The dance music scene refused to respect individual markets for what they were. I don?t give a **** if you can draw 40,000 people in LA. In Baltimore and DC you can?t. Promoters and some big name DJs had no respect for that. They'd tell you 'Well, I'd rather not play.'"

But if you talk to the agents, it's the promoters that are greedy. "One of two people gets the money," says Gerry Gerrard, the agent of luminaries including Oakenfold, Prodigy and Chemical Brothers. "The promoter or the DJ. My job is to make sure the DJ gets his fair share."

"It sucks what's happening right now," says Kurt Eckes, from Milwaukee's DropBass Network, the promoters behind the Midwest's Further festivals. "But it's also sweet revenge. I can still do underground events and keep my ball rolling. But at least all these DJs counting on these $10,000 nights aren't getting them anymore."

So here we are, the bitter, the jaded, the disappointed: the rave scene. Some people were and are true to the scene, to the music. Others just wanted to profit, and many, probably, sought the best of both worlds. "I've been doing this for years now," said Scott Richmond, one of the owners of Satellite Records, one of the top vinyl outlets in New York, during a heated conversation about money corrupting the art that was the rave scene. "Don't I have a right to make a living!?" And it's true, we all have the right to make a living. But that right was never guaranteed from the rave scene. Rave, at its origins, was just a couple of turntables, some good records, and people that wanted to dance. The rave scene today is Shel Silverstein's Giving Tree. It gave its music, its fashion, its coolness. Now who will sit with its lonely stump of a DIY ethic when there is no more money to make?

.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Some 12, 13 years ago, a Bush was in office, our economy was tanking, and the drums of war with Iraq were the perfect backdrop for rave to flourish. Today, history has eerily repeated itself. It won't be rave that benefits from all that energy of dissent, though, but rather whatever is next. Subcultures never die; they just fade into the cultural detritus from which new art forms grow. The hippies didn?t last forever, neither did disco or punk. Yet key elements from these subcultures came together and fostered techno-drenched outlaw parties. One of the few e-mail lists I found with increasing membership was "Digital Hell," a mailing list for desktop maestros. "The dance floors may be thinning," says Wally Winfrey, list moderator. "But the bedrooms are full of activity. I reckon we'll see the fruition of that in the next few years."

There are mixed emotions at the wake. Some embrace denial, pointing to the one-offs that, while dwindling, will lumber on for a time; there is still money to be made, after all. Others offer up the occasional breakout chart hits, the Mobys, the Dirty Vegases, as if that has anything to do with rave. The very word itself has become an unsanitary term, four letters that embody everything that was corporate and drug-addled and exploited about a musical and cultural movement. I'm talking to Sasson Perry of Bay Area-based Coolworld promotions, who has thrown a series of parties that have drawn in excess of 15,000 people. And every time I ask him about raves, he stops the conversation and, politely but firmly, explains to me that he promotes "dance music festivals." Scott Henry recalls that when Fox News did an "expose" on his club ? sneaking in some cameras and splashing drug use on the evening news ? "They just kept using that word over and over again, enunciating it each time. Do you know what a rave is? This is a rave. Your kids might be going to raves."

So let us spare the false spin of positivity and go out like we came in, with dignity. The two great house DJs Mark Farina and Derrick Carter were roommates in Chicago in the late ?80s and early ?90s, throwing parties before they were called raves, before anyone knew how they were supposed to dress or what PLUR meant. "We were playing underground, Detroit, Chicago tracky minimal stuff to maybe 200 people," says Farina. "You were doin' a party to provide better music, do a better venue than the next guy. It was competitive like that as opposed to 'I'm gonna do bank on this party'."

"You could rent someone's loft for the night for like $300," remembers Carter. "If you knew someone, maybe a cat's a little low on their rent? $150, $200 for the sound system, cover the kegs and everyone gets 50 bucks lunch money or whatever. Cause ****! I got all these records sitting in my house. I don't eat properly and I look stupid cause I can't afford good clothes. But I got these hot-ass records. ****! These records gonna get heard. I'm gonna have a party and play good records and laugh and see people we like and it'll be cool. That was all right. It was enough."

It was enough. Savor your memories as we share a moment of silence for rave, a glowstick poured out for our homies onto the cold concrete of a deserted warehouse floor. Perhaps it will be enough again, in some other way, in some time to be. And the dance will begin anew.

Eh, it wasn't so bad then, though of course I didn't really know what I was missing. PLUR was still widespread, and meth hadn't really creeped into the scene yet as far as I could tell(when I finally actually saw someone hitting a meth pipe at a rave, I knew it was all over). And I didn't mind all the High School kids because I was fresh out of High School myself.